


AO3 Ship Stats 2013: Additional Discussion

by centreoftheselights



Series: AO3 Ship Stats [2]
Category: No Fandom
Genre: AO3 Statistics, Archived From Tumblr, Archived From centrumlumina Tumblr, Fandom Meta - Freeform, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Racism in fandom, Sexism in Fandom, Slash Fandom, fandom discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2019-09-14 11:07:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/centreoftheselights/pseuds/centreoftheselights
Summary: A collection of several discussions and additional analyses based on the2013 AO3 Ship Stats.





	1. Responses to Stage 0: Acknowledging the Limitations

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [AO3 Ship Stats 2013](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911123) by [centreoftheselights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/centreoftheselights/pseuds/centreoftheselights). 



> Archived from Tumblr in December 2018.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of responses to [Stage 0: Acknowledging the Limitations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911123/chapters/39730371).
> 
> A conversation about the ways in which AO3 may not be representative of the entirety of fandom, along with some comments on the Misogyny?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted 19th - 22nd August 2013.

**From Tumblr user[wrangletangle](https://wrangletangle.tumblr.com/post/58714146297/stage-0-acknowledging-the-limitations)**:

Last week, centrumlumina posted a fascinating series on AO3 shipping stats. This week, I’ll be reblogging it piece by piece, under the tag #centrumlumina (and #numbers, my new tag for AO3 stats).

I like the caveats mentioned here. I’d add to #1 that AO3 has seen relatively low adoption rates (percentage-wise) among the following groups at least (there are probably others as well):

  * Fans of some very old, mostly-zine fandoms
  * Fans of non-English source-canons
  * Fans who don’t speak or fan in English (some folks who speak English don’t fan in it)
  * Video Game, Tabletop, and other RPG fans
  * Fans who work in mediums other than text (who often dominate a fandom, so its representation on AO3 is skewed very low)



Many of these are areas we’re working on, but to see not a single Sailor Moon F/F ship on the final list is indicative of at least part of the limitations of AO3 as a data source. Still, the results say a lot about the parts of fandom that do us AO3, so they’re very useful!

**My response:**

These are all good points; it’s clear that there’s a lot less representation of older fandoms, of fanworks in languages other than English, and of fandoms of certain types.

One thing which did occur to me is the possibility that M/M centric fandom is more fic based, while other fandoms are based more in other media and thus see less representation on AO3 (which accepts non-text fanworks, but is not commonly used for them).

However, if that is a contributing factor, I can’t imagine why it might be the case.

 **From Tumblr user[almostperfectalibi](http://almostperfectalibi.tumblr.com/post/58774077015/stage-0-acknowledging-the-limitations)**:

Uh… it seems *incredibly obvious* to me why slash fandom might be more fic-based (if that is indeed the case). Because up until the last 5-10 years or so, if you *wanted* to read about a non-het pairing in one of your favorite fandoms or genres, you had to create it yourself? Whereas if you wanted a het pairing in your favorite fandom or genre, one probably already existed.

But I mostly wanted to talk about the idea that the AO3 is representative of anything *except* the users of the AO3. And sadly for science, it isn’t. You can probably use the AO3 numbers to examine *very specific* trends, like if you’re specifically examining megafandoms that arose from English-language movies in the last 5 years or so, and making comparisons between those types of fandoms. But, you really have to remember that the AO3 only opened in November of 2009. It’s not even four years old yet. It’s literally still in beta. It’s tempting to think that the AO3 *must* be representative because it’s so big, but that doesn’t actually follow logically. Four years is a *blip* on the timeline of fandom, and the AO3 still reflects, very strongly, the demographics of its earliest users, the “initial adopters,” which is to say mostly Western tv/movie based m/m slash fandom.

Why would people not move to the AO3? Well, there are lots and lots of fandoms that *already had* active, centralized archives (or mailing lists or forums or LJ communities or ff.net based communities) four years ago, and that affects the rate of adoption in different fandoms. If a fandom already has an archive or a centrally located community, if their stories are already permanently hosted somewhere stable, it’s a lot less likely that they’ll move to AO3 or even cross-post/back up their stories there.

There’s a reason why nearly all of the biggest mega-fandoms on the archive, Sherlock and Teen Wolf and the MCU and Eleventh Doctor and etc., are fandoms that started (or suddenly became popular) *after November 2009*. (Even Supernatural somewhat follows this pattern– it first aired in 2005– but got a “second wind” and a huge new influx of fans several years into its run, when Castiel became a character– IIRC, in late 2008/early 2009.)

So basically, no, I don’t think you can use the AO3 to talk about “fandom.” MAYBE the part of fandom that most people mean when they say “Western slash-based media fandom” – but even then, you’re really only talking about a couple of years of data, from late 2009 to mid 2013.

For instance, look at “Starsky & Hutch” on the archive. About 1,400 fanworks, and that includes everything, gen AND slash. But if you look up Starsky & Hutch archives on Fanlore, it lists a bunch of different ones (including some that are now defunct). Significantly, there is one called the Bay City Library, which lists about 3,700 stories– and the Bay City Library is *gen only* and, I think, it is also *online* only. So let’s pretend that the BCL has collected *all* the gen S&H on the internet, and that S&H fandom has an equal number of gen and slash stories, bringing it to 7,400 stories total. (And again, that’s just the stories that are *online*– it doesn’t represent the stories in zines.) Still, that’s at least 6,000 S&H stories that aren’t on the AO3.

And that’s just one fandom, but it’s a fandom that is *crucial* to any study of “slash trends,” because of the role it played in mostly-female Western media fandom (and slash fandom) splitting off from traditional sci-fi fandom and becoming its own thing, with its own zines, cons, mailing lists, traditions, types of fanworks, fannish tropes, and so on. Many, *many* of the fandoms I think of as hugely important influences in the history & development of fic-based Western media fandom (and the subset of it that is slash fandom)– fandoms like Xena, Buffy, the Sailor Moon English dub, popslash– and those are just the ones I personally remember being around for– anyway, these fandoms, and many like them, have not become huge adopters of the AO3, because they had their own spaces already, that predated the AO3.

I mean, on the AO3, Teen Wolf is massively bigger than Harry Potter. (Roughly, there’s about 24,000 Teen Wolf vs about 16,500 Harry Potter.) But there are over *6,500,000* Harry Potter stories on ff.net, and only 9,000 Teen Wolf stories. Which is more a representative or more accurate depiction of the actual popularity of those fandoms?

And that’s for a pretty recent fandom that a lot of us were actually *in*. What about older fandoms? Even Star Trek is mostly represented on the AO3 because of the 2009 reboot, and Doctor Who mostly because of “New Who” and Eleven specifically. And the disparity is even greater when you look at “oldschool” zine era fandoms like The Professionals or Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Any attempt to analyze “fandom”– even any attempt to analyze “Western slash fandom”– that doesn’t take into account all these factors, just because it’s *easier* to get the data from the AO3… is unfortunately going to be seriously flawed. Again, I’m sure it’s very tempting to say “It’s so big! It MUST be representative!” But that’s just about as logical as saying “This football stadium is full of people! There’s so many of them, they must be demographically representative of the entire population of this state!” No, not really. There’s just a lot of them, that’s all.

 **My response** :

You raise several good points, some of which I have already dealt with in other posts in the series. (The post you are responding to was literally the first thing I wrote on the topic, based on my past experience of doing single-fandom analyses with AO3 data - a far more comprehensive analysis would be [my conclusion post](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911123/chapters/39731508).)

First of all, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about my comment that I didn’t understand why M/M fandom might be more fic based than other types of fandom.

I meant to say that there is no good reason for there to be a direct _causal_ link between a fandom being focussed on M/M pairings (which, by the way, is not equivalent to non-het - the entire point of this analysis was to look into the dearth of F/F fics on AO3) and that fandom preferring fic to art, vids, etc.

I understand that both of these traits may be correlated, because, for instance, they are both popular in Western film/TV fandoms. I can also see why non-het pairings might produce more fic than het ones, by the logic you suggested (although I’m not sure why that would prioritise fic over other kinds of fanwork). But neither of those explain why F/F pairings, even within Western film/TV fandoms, seem to be so under-represented.

Secondly, as I pointed out in my conclusion: yes, this data is very chronologically limited because AO3 is such a new site. It does not reflect the trends and tendencies of older fandoms. But if the focus on M/M is a sudden new trend which only applies to fandoms which have become popular in the last few years, that is still _**really worth talking about**._

I am not, and never claimed to be, making claims about the entire history of fandom. I have only been participating in fandom for two years - in which time, Teen Wolf _has_ been far more popular than Harry Potter (she claimed, anecdotally). I do care about past trends, but I am not the right person to analyse them.

I will acknowledge that I have next to no familiarity with non-Western or non-English-using fandoms, so if (as I have been told) AO3 is less popular there, these results are almost certainly biased in that respect. I have since edited the original post to reflect this.

Note: I’m really glad to see people responding to my analysis, but I am very busy IRL at the moment, and I will not necessarily be able to respond to everything promptly.

 **From Tumblr user[almostperfectalibi](http://almostperfectalibi.tumblr.com/post/58901518059/stage-0-acknowledging-the-limitations)**:

First off… I really wish you were posting this analysis somewhere besides Tumblr, because I think this project would really benefit from comments and discussion, but it’s basically impossible to do that on tumblr in any depth.

So, anyway.

> I understand that both of these traits may be correlated, because, for instance, they are both popular in Western film/TV fandoms. I can also see why non-het pairings might produce more fic than het ones, by the logic you suggested (although I’m not sure why that would prioritise fic over other kinds of fanwork). But neither of those explain why F/F pairings, even within Western film/TV fandoms, seem to be so under-represented.

Again, pretty much every aspect of this can be explained by looking back at the *history* of fandom. “Back in the day” fandom was much more fic-focused than art-focused because fic was much more easily reproduced in zines and much more easily transmitted over slow, dial-up internet connections. Before Geocities and livejournal and photobucket and deviantart, before Photoshop and cheap scanners and art tablets and Instagram, it was really difficult and *really expensive* to be a fanartist. So these older fandoms, (and the newer fandoms that were heavily influenced by the culture of those older fandoms) are still not all that fanart-focused, whereas newer fandoms are. It’s the same thing with f/f. Blockbuster media fandoms focused on a single M/M OTP go back to the 1960s— Starsky & Hutch, Professionals, Man from UNCLE, I Spy, etc. And again, it was the sixties, and being “in the slash closet” was a MUCH bigger thing then than it was now— which obviously fostered a stronger sense of community among slash fans than would have developed otherwise. Once you found this secret, close-knit community of people, once you actually found out there WERE people who had the same kinds of thoughts as you did, you would be much more likely to stay, and not drift away (as opposed to someone who just liked Man from Uncle in a gen way, for instance.) And F/F wasn’t even in the picture, because it was rare to have *one* lead female character on a popular SF/F or action/adventure show back then, let alone more than one.

There wasn’t a blockbuster F/F fandom until Xena in the 90s, because there wansn’t a *show* like Xena until the 90s. The raw material just didn’t exist. And post-Xena, a lot of that community eventually drifted away, because there wasn’t a mainstream canon with an intense, canon female friendship for them to latch on to— there was no “new ship” to jump on. (A lot of them went to ST:VOY to ship Seven/Janeway, but after that, I don’t know. The fact is, actual *canon relationships* that could be turned into an OTP are just way, way more common for M/M and M/F pairings than they are for F/F.) If there had been a “new Xena” every 5 years or so, and the F/F fans had been able to keep building on the momentum of Xena, maybe fandom would look very different today. But imaging being a F/F fan who watched Xena *because it prioritized the relationship between two women* and made women the heroes and villains and *everyone*— all the most important characters— that fan is not going to suddenly start watching Smallville or The Sentinel, which were all about the dudes and their dude angst, and being satisfied with slashing some minor background characters who never pass Bechdel all season long because their entire storyline is about being obsessed with dudes and carrying water for them and being fought over like an object by two dudes.

If you want an explanation as to why there’s not a lot of F/F ships, you have to at least consider the raw material of canon, ie, what are the actual shows. What types of shows are popular IRL? What types of shows are popular in fandom? Is there a difference? What explains that? Like… Even in shows with two female leads like Scott & Bailey or Rizzoli & Isles, there’s often a strong het ship for one or both of the characters— and their “outside the OTP” relationships are given a weight and a significance that is *almost never* given to a male lead in a slashy OTP (an exception maybe being Elizabeth in White Collar). And that affects people’s ability to get *really invested* in that relationship. Look at the top 20 TV-show based F/F ships on the AO3— how many of those are about the *two main characters* of the show, the way most M/M ships are? Not one main character and a recurring character, or two supporting leads in an ensemble led by male characters— an actual F/F ship made up of two leads. (I’ll even accept a female hero/villain pairing as long as they are the *lead hero* and the *lead villain.*) There are not many like that, I’d bet, because it’s very, very rare to *have* two female leads on a show, who are devoted *to each other* over everything (either in a loving or a hero/nemesis way) the way that male leads *often* are, and that is a big reason why F/F media fandom got its big launch 30 years later than M/M media fandom did. It seemed like there was zero awareness of this historical context in your “Misogyny?” post and I just… don’t really understand that. Yes, fandom often ignores women and PoC in favor of white men. But asking “historically, why is fandom low on femslash” is sort of like asking why “Stargate SG-1” fandom is low on femslash. Because for eight years there was only one female lead, and her most important relationships were with men, so even if you desperately wanted there to be femslash, it was really, really tough! (And I say this as someone who’s written Sam Carter femslash for an exchange, and had to look REALLY HARD for any Sam/f options.) And the thing is, femslash fandom totally tried? They totally slashed Sam and Janet, but Janet was never a lead— and her relationship with Sam was never really treated as important in the narrative the way that the Jack/Sam or Jack/Daniel relationships where.)

Anyway, my basic point is… I just don’t think analysis of numbers *means anything* without some actual context. Number one, the actual historical context of fandom, and historical trends of why things happened and how and etc., and number two, stepping back and looking at how fandom relates to the wider institution of pop culture in general. Otherwise you’re just saying “this is bigger than that! It must mean something… but what!?”

 **My response** :

There are three things I want to say to this, and they are not at all related.

First of all - thank you to everyone who is interested in this. I never expected to get more than two notes. The intention was always to encourage discussion, but I did not expect that to be with people I don’t know personally. If more people think it’s a good idea, I could make an LJ post for some further discussion when I’m back somewhere with a reliable internet connection.

Secondly - and this is more a general comment than specifically directed at you - this was really, really not intended to be an in-depth look at all of the reasons why there is a lack of femslash in fandom. This was a few of my personal opinions on the topic, particularly in response to the comments on this post (hence the title), which contained the following three ideas I hate:

\- It’s all internalised misogyny on the part of the fans.

\- Fandom is all straight women who want to write about pretty boys.

\- It’s all in your head; there’s plenty of femslash out there in other fandoms.

The ‘Misogyny?’ post was my way of trying to outline that the issue is way too complicated to have one answer; it’s down to an interplay of what’s available in canon and what the fans latch onto, and those things feed back to each other in various ways.

So, the reason I didn’t put any historical context in was because… I’m not aware of the historical context? I’ve been in fandom all of two years, I haven’t even heard of half those fandoms. It isn’t something I know off the top of my head, and this isn’t something I did (or realistically could have done) background research for.

It was just my thoughts. Now there are your thoughts too. Yay.

Thirdly, and finally, the one thing I take issue with: I feel like you’re setting the bar too high.

Don’t get me wrong, some fandoms are never going to be femslash heavy. I’m a Supernatural femslash fan; I understand that.

But claiming that a canon has to be female-centric before the possibility of femslash arises seems to be asking too much. By my reckoning, barely half of the top twenty M/M pairings meet your criteria; the rest are pairings between side characters or ensemble casts.

I understand that female-centric canons are more conducive to F/F pairings, but a lack of canon interaction has never seemed to stop a M/M pairing. Fanlore informs me Clint/Coulson had only 47 seconds of shared screentime in canon, but they make it to #19. Pepper/Natasha, a pairing with significantly more interaction from the same movie series, was not even close to making the list.

I’m not saying mainstream media doesn’t have its share of the blame, but I really refuse to believe that there hasn’t been a single good female-centric TV show since the 90’s.

 **From Tumblr user drcabl3** :

So, this is mainly a response to amlostperfectalibi, because I do know a bit about earlier fandom, not through involvement, but through reading about it.  
Most of this reading is ‘the democratic genre’ an excellent 2005 book that is the best formal study of fandom I know of(especially pre-internet stuff, though it’s become a bit outdated lately. this shouldn’t be a problem, as we’re talking about the history of fandom). Unless otherwise cited, assume my source is this book.

I don’t agree with you that slash was a significant part of early fic- hell, sex barely featured in the early fandom. Taking star trek, widely known as the birth of slash, it wasn’t till 6 years after the show hit the air that the first “adult” fic journal was created in 1972. Adult meant “het and explicit” because there was nothing else in fandom.

The first published K/S fic, commonly thought of as the first slash fic was published in this journal 2 years later. and it was an implied pairing. An implied, non-explicit side pairing. Four years later before m/m got a journal of its own. Certainly as fanfic spreads from trek to fandoms like Starsky and hutch in the late 70s, slash spreads with it. However it is still a small part of fanfic- gen is still the vast majority at this point and het is still far greater than slash.

Slash is, however, LOUD. Partially because slashers are loud- they need to be, because they are constantly under attack by anti slashers, which were a significant grouping in mid term fandom.

Not only anti-slashers within fandom, but those without- the mainstream media likes little more than to write about than teenage girls who write about men fucking each other.

This has warped us into thinking slash was more common than it actually was. Not to say it’s small compared to fem/femme slash(I can see little to no evidence of femslash in early fandom), but it wasn’t a greater proportion than het or gen.

This is important, because there were next to no decent female characters in these fandoms- yet the majority of shipping is het. This should provide a rebuttal to the idea that femslash is behind because of a lack of female characters(though It’s more complex than this- see below)- 1dimensional female characters do not stop people shipping them.

This adds a better, more subtle understanding to the history of fandom I think? However, it does not deal with the lack of femslash, only providing a rebuttal almostperficatalibis  explanation for the prevalence of slash.

almostperficatalibis point that representation does damage femslash potential has some substance however- taking the recent examples of glee and OUAT, you can see that more female characters of a stronger variety(Esp in OUAT where there’s the traditional slash dynamic of two strong characters with a healthy rivalry) lead to a far greater proportion of femslash- even to the detriment of slash.

The balances look like this(on ao3. Recent fandoms so should be quite representative):

  * All fandom(on ao3): 49:5:22:26 (slash:femslash:het:gen)
  * Glee: 63:18:14:17
  * OUAT: 4:25:54:23



So, we can see from two fandoms with large proportions of strong* female characters we get more femslash- the rest of the results are mucky- it absolutely kills slash in OUAT, which has virtually know male characters of strength(Not a criticism), but boosts it in glee, which has some decent male characters as well(incl a decent proportion of canon queer characters(which will be something to go into sometime, maybe?))

However, This doesn’t always work- buffy has serious problems with fs, despite having willow, self Id’d as gay, in several queer relationships, even sleeping w/ buffy (also a strong female character) once(comics canon), which would with male characters create a dedicated, willow/buffy fandom of the strek kind.

I don’t have good numbers to back this up- This is personal experience, and anecdotal evidence(the golden frog awards, for willow centric fic, are almost always awarded to het pairings, for example), simply because ao3 is not a good metric for buffy.

At the end of the day, I think we can say that there certainly effects of having lots of strong female characters, and these often include a more equal femslash proportion, but we have far from conclusive evidence, and we certainly cannot suggest that the lack of decent female characters is the sole cause of the femslash problem, and neither can we say that people slash because of tradition- slash grew like a trend, and it is only recently(post 2000) that we have had this kind of proportion of slash.

My experience does not extend into non-western fandom, and I can make no comment here.

*taking ‘effect over plot’ as the measure of strength. And I’m far from saying these are perfect, or even good, in terms of female characters. But they’re indisputably better than most media with fandoms.


	2. Response to Stage 3: Making a List

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Explanation of why some tags appear multiple times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted 25th August 2013.

**From Tumblr user peeptomkins** :

I wonder if there is any way technically to combine “Merlin/Arthur Pendragon” and “Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)” tags, because basically they are one and the same thing. Combined they would make almost 12000 fics, which would place them 4th on the list.

 **My response** :

Actually, there is a way! It’s called [tag wrangling](http://archiveofourown.org/archive_faqs/10), and the wranglers have already worked out that those two tags are more-or-less the same. All of the Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) fics are already double-listed in the Merlin/Arthur Pendragon tag, so I’m afraid combining them wouldn’t push them up at all!


	3. Responses to Stage 10: Misogyny?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Discussions of possible reasons for the lack of F/F shipping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted 25th - 26th August 2013.

**From Tumblr user[lampbane](http://lampbane.tumblr.com/post/59320681364/stage-10-misogyny)**:

Or it could be that the majority of fanfic writers on AO3 are heterosexual women, and these heterosexual women are writing about what gets them wet, that being guys banging, whether its banging other men or banging women. 

Granted, some women could make an effort to write more F/F (and even F/M) slash, but it really depends on who they’re writing their fic for, whether they’re writing for themselves, their friends, or fandom in general. The content will reflect the audience its tailored to, and for many, their readership is themselves and their closest friends.

For the percentage of F/F fics to go up, the demographics would need to shift.

 **My response** :

Do you have a source for that claim? I’d be interested to see numbers, if you have them.

Because I’m fairly sure I’ve seen surveys which suggest fandom as a whole contains a significant fraction of non-heterosexual women. Perhaps not a majority, it’s true, but enough that if everyone is just “writing about what gets them wet” (and if we continue to make the assumption that this is determined strictly by sexual orientation, not by any other preferences they might have) then you would probably expect more F/F pairings than there actually are.

[#responses](http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/tagged/responses) [#please do not claim demographics unless you have a source suggesting that fandom is less than about 5% people attracted to women](http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/tagged/please-do-not-claim-demographics-unless-you-have-a-source-suggesting-that-fandom-is-less-than-about-5%25-people-attracted-to-women) [#because that’s about the level of femslash that currently exists](http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/tagged/because-that%27s-about-the-level-of-femslash-that-currently-exists) [#and it is significantly lower than the proportion of women in the population who are queer](http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/tagged/and-it-is-significantly-lower-than-the-proportion-of-women-in-the-population-who-are-queer) [#ao3 ship stats](http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/tagged/ao3-ship-stats)

 **From Tumblr user[lampbane](http://lampbane.tumblr.com/post/59364559500/stage-10-misogyny)**:

Significantly lower? Approximately 3.8% of the American population identifies as LGBT, and even accounting for the number of people who aren’t public about their identity, 5% (the number you give for the number of femslash fics) is definitely not lower or significantly different. (Especially since that 3.8% isn’t even just the female queer population.) 

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States&t=ZTMzMWM3OTc1ZWJiYjdmNjViMjI3NTFlOTQzM2VlZmU3MjAxMGNkMixWaFlETjdhOA%3D%3D&b=t%3AzSKdcDHpEksXRnLnhVnJQA&p=http%3A%2F%2Fcentrumlumina.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F59378755930%2Fstage-10-misogyny&m=1)

And yes, the majority of fanfic writers are women, it’s not just a stereotype.

[http://ffnresearch.blogspot.com/2011/03/fan-fiction-demographics-in-2010-age.html](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fffnresearch.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F03%2Ffan-fiction-demographics-in-2010-age.html&t=Yjc0ODkzYmNmZmE5MWE5Njg4Y2ZmZmEwOTBlODE5MmVlMDc5Zjg1ZSxWaFlETjdhOA%3D%3D&b=t%3AzSKdcDHpEksXRnLnhVnJQA&p=http%3A%2F%2Fcentrumlumina.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F59378755930%2Fstage-10-misogyny&m=1)

The percentages aren’t going to translate exactly (especially with that self-reported 78% of fanfic writers versus a government-reported number of 50.2% women for the general US population). But it’s a fair assumption for me to say that the majority of fanfic writers are heterosexual women. Even if fandom draws more queer individuals (and I do think it does), given this available data, percentage-wise we’re still in the same ballpark.

Now, not everyone is writing for sexual reasons, but it is also not something that should be discounted either.

 **My response** :

I’m not claiming that the majority of fanfic authors aren’t women, but I am claiming that those women are not straight nearly as often as you seem to think.

The number I remember for fandom was 30%; I can’t find the source for that again, but I can find [these statistics](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FYaoi_fandom%23Demographics&t=MDcxYTNjNjUyMDQ5NTIyNTY3ZTQ3Mzc1ZmJiMDUyNWVmYzI4YTI5ZCxWaFlETjdhOA%3D%3D&b=t%3AzSKdcDHpEksXRnLnhVnJQA&p=http%3A%2F%2Fcentrumlumina.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F59378755930%2Fstage-10-misogyny&m=1) that among Western BL-genre fans, only about half of the fans - 47% in [the English-speaking survery discussed here](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.participations.org%2FVolume%25205%2FIssue%25202%2F5_02_pagliassotti.htm&t=NTA4NzA3MmMwYTkzMzYzMjhmYjlkMDlmMzhlYjZjNzZkNDhiZjUyMCxWaFlETjdhOA%3D%3D&b=t%3AzSKdcDHpEksXRnLnhVnJQA&p=http%3A%2F%2Fcentrumlumina.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F59378755930%2Fstage-10-misogyny&m=1) \- surveyed were heterosexual. Looking at the data, only 50% of the participants surveyed, male or female, were exclusively attracted to men. Barely a majority.

As I said in the original post, most of my evidence for dismissing the “het women wanting to write about men” argument is that, after a year in fandom, the vast majority of the people I have encountered have been queer. This is obviously anecdotal, but I find it hard to imagine that queer women make up less than 10% of fandom as a whole.

Well, that and because it seems hideously dismissive to claim that the relationships people care about are determined strictly by their sexual orientations. And because it completely fails to account for me, an asexual woman, being in fandom at all - or several of the slash authors I know who identify as lesbian.

 **From Tumblr user believerinrandomcapitalization** :

Um, hi. I’m just gonna jump in here and say that most fanfic writers write about people they see in the media that have great character depth and very evident emotional bonds etc, etc, and, honestly, the media just doesn’t cater that. The media doesn’t cater strong female characters that have meaningful, emotional connections/interactions with other women. I know I’d write more F/F fanfic if I could actually _find a lesbian pairing I liked whose relationship was more than sex and who had great character development._ But there aren’t _many of those kinds of relationships in popular tv shows._ It’s a shame and it totally sucks for fanfic writers that want to be diverse and delve into all kinds of genres, but it’s a simple fact that, if you wanna write about women, a lot of it will be characters that have no true backstory, emotional development, and have possibly never even met each other before in the media world. 

So, I dunno. I kinda lost track of your guys’s argument because ahhhh all sorts of complicated things going on, but I feel like the answer is actually not that the writers are sexist, it’s that the media is sexist and doesn’t give fanfic writers good female characters to work off of.

IreallyhopeIdidn’toffendanyoneI’msorryifIdidokaybye.

 **My response** :

(You didn’t offend me! I love talking to people about this stuff.)

This is also a very good point, and I definitely think it contributes, although my argument is basically “it’s complicated and you can’t put it down to just one factor.”

I don’t mind shipping pairings which never canonically met - I tend to do it regardless - but it isn’t for everyone. Unfortunately, us F/F fans sometimes seem to have no other option - we literally don’t if the source material doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.

However, I also think to some extent that fandom doesn’t have a culture of seeking out and getting into F/F ships the way they do M/M ones, just because, until recently, there weren’t many to find. However, now that more potential pairings are beginning to appear, it can be difficult to know where to go for help and advice or even just an audience, while M/M shippers have fifty years’ worth of resources to turn to.


	4. Additional Asks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asks received in response to the project.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted 25th August - 1st September 2013.

**Anonymous ask** :

I find what you wrote about misogyny on AO3 really interesting, because I have practically the same thoughts. I think it partially boils down to not having enough female characters to ship. It's much harder to find a fandom with more than one prominent female character than it is with male characters (Supernatural, Sherlock, even Tolkien). Among my OTPs are Gwen/Morgana (Merlin), Brittana (Glee), and I really love genderbent Sherlock Holmes including fem!Johnlock.

Just want to clarify something, by prominent female characters I mean mostly main characters. I know Supernatural and Sherlock and stuff have brilliant secondary female characters and even some shows will have one female main cast member (like Elementary up to the last few episodes) but there’s definitely not enough important female characters.

 **My response** :

I’m glad you’re interested in the topic too!

I’d argue that the reasons are probably more complicated than just one factor, although I definitely think the lack of female main characters is a contributing factor.

However, there are some source materials with prominent female characters - not many, but some - and fandom doesn’t seem to pick up on them as strongly. For instance, Emma/Regina (on Once Upon a Time) is a ship between the main hero and one of two main villains, both of whom are female. Yet it’s overtaken on the list by Rumplestiltskin/Belle, a F/M ship between the other main villain and a side character.

Still, it’s very hard to give a simple answer as to what causes people to ship what they ship, and I definitely understand why shows like Supernatural, which has some good female characters but not as the main focus, is never going to have as many F/F ships as a show with multiple women in the main cast.

 

 **Ask from Tumblr user iwillfightforyoustill** :

I saw your discussion of fandom demographics (specifically here: post/59378755930/stage-10-misogyny) and I just wanted to offer up another source for you - specifically on slashers, which I'd think makes it even more relevant. It's a little dated, but it concludes that the majority identify as queer: melannen(.)dreamwidth(.)org/77558(.)html (Also, PS: it's all super awesome analysis and I really love it!)

 **My response** :

Thank you very much for this!

[Here’s the link](https://melannen.dreamwidth.org/77558.html). This backs up the numbers I’ve seen around - that fandom is at least 30%, if not majority, queer.


	5. Racial Analysis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An analysis on race in the pairing list, submitted to my Tumblr by Tumblr user happybelated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted 7th October 2013.

I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of analyzing your AO3 cenus data in terms of racial representation.

Only 18 ships out of the 161 ships have at least one person of color in their ship. (The 161 number includes the doubles though.)

  * 35 - Zayn/Liam
  * 57 - Santana/Brittany
  * 60 - Zayn/Niall
  * 68 - Boyd/Erica
  * 77 - Spock/Uhura
  * 78 - Regina Mills/Emma Swan
  * 94 - Gwen/Arthur
  * 95 - Sasuke/Naruto
  * 108 - Kakashi/Iruka
  * 110 - Zayn/Harry
  * 114 - Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
  * 127 - Derek/Spencer
  * 150 - Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell
  * 153 - Axel/Roxas
  * 154 - Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy
  * 155 - Akanishi Jin/Kamenashi Kazuya
  * 157 - Zayn/Louis
  * 161 - Pavel Chekov/Hikaru Sulu



11/18 ships are interracial pairings, so one person of color and one white person.

4/18 of them include Zayn Malik.

13 are pairings with fictional characters, 5 are pairings with real people. Out of the fictional characters, 6 pairings are of Anime/Manga characters. The only ship, without Zayn in it, that includes real people is Akanishi Jin/Kamenashi Kazuya from the Japanese boy group KAT-TUN.

11 pairings are m/m, 5 are f/m, and 2 are f/f.

Races:

8 pairings include at least one Japanese person/character.

4 include Zayn who is half-Pakistani.

Actors/actresses and their race:

Santana - Naya Rivera (Puerto Rican, African-American, and German)

Boyd - Sinqua Walls (Black, Native American, and French)

Uhura - Nichelle Nichols (Black)

Uhura - Zoe Saldana (Dominican, Puerto Rican)

Derek - Shemar Moore (African-American, Irish, and French Canadian)

Regina - Lana Parrilla (Sicilian and Puerto Rican)

Gwen - Angel Coulby (mixed, assuming white/black)

7/18 of the ships include a woman as the poc. so 7/161 ships include at least one woman of color. and 11/161 include at least one man of color. i think.

—

Hopefully this is all correct, I don’t know if Homestuck characters have races so I kinda just skipped over them.

 

**My response** :

Thank you for this! It’s very interesting, and I’m glad someone had the time to look at it. As far as I know, this is all correct - Homestuck characters are not normally considered as having a canonical race. Actually, in most of my analysis for this dataset, I was only looking at the top 100 (because the data is more prone to errors the further you go down the list) which would mean only 8% of the ships in the top 100 included at least one POC.


End file.
